Shoulder & Rotator Cuff Rehab for BJJ | Part 1 (13 min)

I want to feel the shoulder blades moving down and together, so I'm not letting the shoulders come up towards my ears. And then when I've done about 10 of those, I'm going to go back and we're going to go back to this one again. Same sort of length of time. I'll advise people with shoulder pain, I'll get them doing a lot of this.

So I'll usually get them doing two to three holds, two to three times a day. And very often this is a nice quick way of getting on top of that pain. And then relax, just shake your shoulders out. And we're going to go back to this one again.

So the thing with all of these is we're putting some load on the shoulder, on the tendons. Tendons light loading. A lot of the time, contrary to popular opinion, if you rest a shoulder that's painful, a lot of the time it'll get worse rather than better. So actually, reactive rehab is often the best approach to take.

But again, if you're getting any pain while you're doing this, do feel free to back off or to cut the set short. We don't want any heroics, not just yet anyway. So we're back to pushing outwards against the band. And this isn't terribly exciting, I'm afraid, but it is very effective.

And you should be starting to get a little bit of a burn around the shoulder at this point, if you've been doing it correctly. Not too much. Again, we want to keep in the range of discomfort, but without any sharp or severe pain. So this is the final set of these.

You'll be pleased to hear. Okay, and then I can put those to one side. Just give my shoulders a shake out. And I'm going to reach my foam roller.

So with the foam roller, I'm just going to start with the muscles of the upper back. I can support my head with my hands so I'm not having to strain my neck. I'm just going to start with just a general roll. Then I can lean towards one side.

So I'm now working into the lat muscles and to the rotator cuff, all those good shoulder muscles on my right side. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to find those slightly sore, slightly tender points and I'm going to hang out there for a little bit. Now, this should feel like good pain. That's how people usually describe it.

If it's feeling just really sore, then you're doing too much. You need to take some of the pressure off. I've worked into that a little bit. I'm going to switch sides.

It's fine to focus a bit more on the shoulder that you're wanting to work on, but it's good to do some work on the other side as well. So it's for the front of this massage, on the shoulder. You want to거 And when I've done that, I'm just going to place the roller around the bottom of my rib cage. Okay?

So this is where your lumbar spine joins your thoracic spine. And I'm going to put my hands behind my head again, so I'm supporting my neck. And this is a really nice upper back mobilisation. So I'm just going to lean back, then come up.

I'm going to do that about three, four or five times. I'm going to roll just slightly. I'm going to do the same thing again. So it's really worth taking your time over this one.

And I'm just going to roll down again and do the same thing. And you might be wondering what on earth this has got to do with shoulder pain. One of the things is upper back mobility is really important for shoulder mobility and shoulder health. So it's one of the things that I'll often work on with people.

And the great thing is you could do this again without aggravating the shoulders. If they're quite sore, quite painful, you can still spend some time working on the upper back. So again, I'm just going in small steps up the back. You might find that some of those things feel a little bit more stiff and more stuck than others.

You can hang out there a little bit longer, spend some more time there if you want. You might also get some clicks and cracks as you go up. That's perfectly normal and nothing to worry about. I want to work my way as high up as I can here.

I want to try and really extend back over the roller at the top of the spine here. And eventually I do run out of spine there. And then I'm just going to do a few more up and down the back. Again, I can come back to each individual shoulder here.

So the lat muscles often don't get much love when people are doing their foam rolling. I like to spend a little bit longer on them. And then I'm just going to flip round onto the opposite side. Do the same thing again.

And finally, to finish off with, I'm just going to go back to the upper back mobilization and do it more quickly this time. So we're just going to do two on each point. And there you have it. That's day one completed.

So we've covered some real basics there. These are exercises which I would very much recommend that you take away and that you do throughout the day. So those isometrics that we were doing before, you can even just do it with a bit of resistance from your other hand. So if you want to do this at work or during the day, that's very easy to put in.

So I would recommend that. And I'll see you back here tomorrow for day two.